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Low carb and calories

I came across and interesting and useful site operated by the US Department of Agriculture that I want to pass along. The site tracks food consumption and calculates for you the nutrient intake of the foods you eat in a given day, then compares them with the ‘ideal’ intake for your weight, height and age. The calculation part of the site is valuable because it shows you the nutrient breakdown of a day’s worth of food intake. The comparison part is hilarious because anyone following a low-carb diet ends up with a lot of negative emotocons.

The USDA site is free and requires only a few minutes to set it up. It requires registration with a username and password, your height, weight and age.

Just for grins, I ran my food intake for last Wednesday, the last day I followed my normal diet. (I have been involved in a project that’s kept me away from home, hearth and computer for most of the day the last couple of days, ergo my lack of posting.)

For breakfast I normally eat 3 fried eggs, 3 sausage patties, some fruit (strawberries and blueberries) and a cup of coffee. As you might imagine, after this 3-egg, 3-sausage breakfast, I’m not particularly hungry when it’s lunchtime, so I don’t usually eat lunch, but I do grab an ounce or so of nuts and a bit of hard Italian sausage around midday. I also drink several cups of Cafe Americano made with espresso throughout the day – usually one for breakfast and three more during the day. For dinner last Wednesday I had a T-bone steak, a few slices of tomato, a grilled zucchini, a glass of red wine, and some berries (strawberries and blueberries) with cream for dessert.

Now anyone would consider this day’s worth of food to be rich, hearty, flavorful and calorie dense. When I ran it through the little handy/dandy USDA site to calculate the nutrient intake, I ended up with this page.

Once I had entered all these foods and quantities, I calculated the nutrient intake, which gave me this page (this is the first of two pages):

As you can see, I ate all that food and ended up eating only 1749 Calories, which is not quite 200 Calories more than the subjects on both the Keys and the Yudkin studies ate. I’ve followed this diet for a lot longer than the 24 weeks the Keys subjects followed their ‘semi-starvation’ diet, and I can assure you that I don’t look like the guy in the bottom picture. The kind of calories one eats – not simply the number – makes an enormous difference. Notice also, that according to the USDA, I’m 727 Calories below what is required to maintain my weight as it is. If you believe the old calories in/calories out theory that tells us that 3500 calories equals a pound of fat, I should be losing a pound of fat every 4.8 days (727/3500), which, again, I am not. My weight is holding pretty steady despite this caloric deficit.

What’s interesting, though, is that if an obese person goes on this same diet, that person will lose weight like crazy. Why does the obese person lose while I don’t on the same caloric deficit? Because the obese person has a deranged metabolism, which is what makes that person obese in the first place. This diet fixes the problem, which allows the fat to be burned off instead of stored.

From this page you can see that I’m in real trouble – at least from the perspective of the pinheads at the USDA. I am the recipient of many sad-faced emotocons, which indicate that my diet is far from what the USDA considers ideal. Far from despairing over these, I’m proud of them. The government is wrong in virtually everything it does, so if it says I’m wrong, then I must be right.

And, finally, here you can see what I need to do to come into compliance with the much-beloved (at least by dietitian- and government-types) food pyramid. I’m proud of my deviant dietary behavior here, too.

This is a fun little site that can gobble up a couple of hours of time. But it is rewarding. It lets you know if you’re exceeding your carb intake. Most people who don’t do well on low-carb diets, don’t do well because they don’t really follow a low-carb diet. Many people who think they’re following a low-carb diet really aren’t. Plug a day’s worth of meals and snacks into this calculator and if the government tells you your diet is lousy and your page is clotted with negative emotocons, then you’re probably on a pretty good diet. The easiest way to tell is to look at the carbohydrate number on the nutrient intake calculator page. If you’re around 50 grams of carb per day or lower, you’re in good shape.

And if you are at 50 grams of carb or lower, I’ll bet that your calories are pretty low as well.

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41 thoughts on “Low carb and calories”

Hmmm… Your omega 6/omega 3 ratio is a little off, but you didn’t include any supplements.

I found this site a few years ago when I first started omitting grains from my diet. Being of a skeptical nature, I wanted to be sure that I was still getting all the vitamins and nutrients needed to be healthy. What I found was that except for calcium, everything else came out at the RDA or well above it. But then I am a salad lover and at the time, my carbs were still higher than 60 gm/day.

After reducing my carbs even further, mostly by limiting fruit, I checked again and found that I was still doing just fine. I lost more weight and dropped down to a point below which I do not wish to go–112 lbs. If I go any lower, I will not be able to donate blood to get rid of my excess iron. But my weight has been stable for two years now. I am hesitant to try IF. BTW being thin is my birthright but I got fat on carbs in middle age.

I am glad to see that your total calorie intake is lower than mine!

Hi Grandma Ann–

I didn’t even notice my own omega-6/omega-3 ration – I’m glad you did it for me. Thanks.

The one thing I forgot to add to the list of what I ate that day was the krill oil and fish oil I took. I suppose we’ve got to add another few calories to the total and a lot more omega-3 fat.

Your last couple of posts remind me of a story I heard about a group of jounalists held captive in a South American jungle. After many months of captivity, and having eaten nothing but hard boiled eggs (apparently that was all their captors could come up with) they emerged from the jungle lean, muscular, and healthy.

I myself was captive to a low fat high endurance exercise lifestyle, and lost little fat and much muscle. After switching to your friend Cordain’s way of eating combined with high intensity exercise, I lost 45 lbs. and have kept it off. I think we need to be clear on what type of weight, fat or lean mass, one loses also.

Great post Dr. Mike. The thing that has irked me recently is the percentage daily value (%DV) numbers on the Nutrition Facts labels. I like having information as to what I am consuming, so listing fat grams and carb grams seems reasonable. The government should not then tell you how this compares to their idiotic “ideal diet”. How about just listing the composition of said food and leaving it at that? By printing %DV the government is essentially telling us what to eat. A truly unbiased system of just reporting information to consumers would allow people to know what they are putting in their mouths while leaving it at that (no %DV). In fact, this could be the foundation of a good lawsuit.

on a similar diet as yours, i plugged my data into fitday and was surprised to see i was below RDA on most nutrients. i don’t take vitamin pills and don’t really want to. is this a concern?

It depends on what data you plugged in. If you plugged one day’s worth of data in, I wouldn’t worry about it because you probably have enough dietary variation to make up on one day what you’re short in on another. If you eat the same thing day in and day out, you might want to pop a good multivitamin from time to time. That’s how I deal with it.

What I am not clear on is how/when the body decides to “switch” from weight loss to weight maintenance on a LC eating plan? For example, I am losing weight steadily on a 1600 calorie LC plan (about 20-40 CHO/day). I am currenly 158 lbs and would like to be 120 lbs. Will I be able to reach 120 lbs on this same plan? Or will I switch to weight maintenance at say 135 lbs, and then have to decrease my calories further to reach 120 lbs? I know these are questions are hypothetical (and that the answer is probably very individual) but your post got me thinking about this. I would love to understand the weight loss vs weight maintenance while low-carbing a little better. Thank you so much for your blog!

Generally when you’re losing weight nicely on a low-carb diet, the weight loss continues until you get to just about where you want to be. Sometimes to get the last few pounds off – and these pounds should be determined by what your body fat percentage is, not your BMI or some other index – you will need to cut the carbs a little more. But most people seem to do fine. In the old medical literature there was a lot of talk about the ‘dynamic’ and the ‘static’ phases of weight change. My experience mirrors what these old papers said, i.e., once someone gets moving down the weight-loss track, the weight just keeps coming off.

I’m with you about if the government says one thing then the opposite must be right.
The sad part is that most doctors and insurance providers believe the government misinformation and at some point I fear that they will try to make everyone conform to their guidelines.

Great post! I have a question about the amount of absolute vs. relative CHO in the diet. For the last month, I’ve been trying to put on some lean mass, so I’ve upped my calorie intake by a couple of hundred cals/day. I hate counting, but I have kept a food journal this month and I’m eating as follows:
2340 Cals, 173g Protein, 130gFat (50% saturated), 108g total CHO, 27g Fiberr =>80g ECC

My daily calorie intake is actually a bit higher (2500+), but a few random fasting days bring the average down quite a bit. I notice that you’re consuming about 12% of your calories from non-fibrous Carbohydrate. If I average mine out, I’m consuming 13-14% calories from CHO (we are talking ECC, right?). So my question is: when you use numbers like “50 grams of carb”, is the absolute amount more important than the relative amount of calories consumed? We’re eating almost the same percentage of calories as carbohydrate, I’m just eating quite a bit more than you.

Obviously, if I’m lifting weights, doing high-intensity interval training, swimming in cold water, and walking several miles daily (hills, quick pace) I’ll need more calories than a bedridden person, but is the amount of glucose required by my brains/organs higher as well?

FYI, I feel best when I eat about 60-70g ECC but I’m just wondering about this from a medical/theoretical perspective.

I look mainly at the relative amount of carbohydrate, or the ECC as we call it. I would imagine your brain wouldn’t consume more glucose than that of a bedridden person nor would your red blood cells, both of which are the two largest obligate consumers of glucose.

Ah, I did *not* subtract fiber from the data that you posted. It looks like you’re closer to 40g CHO, which is quite a bit lower. I’m still curious about the absolute versus relative level of carbohydrate though =D

A really good online source (that doesn’t make judgement calls, by the way) is FitDay (fitday.com). There’s a free online version, and a more robust desktop version (I’ve used this for years). Many, many low-carbers use this tool. You can even enter recipes or common food combinations (like you could customize an entry called something like “Egg/Sausage Breakfast” that includes all the counts for both those items together so you wouldn’t have to make two entries every time). Pretty cool.

FitDay also shows the percentages of macrunutrients, and provides the RDAs for nutrients and shows where you stand. It’s based on the USDA nutrient counts, which I don’t necessarily believe are true in every case. It also has places to track exercise, moods, weight goals, etc.

I take the good from it, and leave the stupid behind. Probably a good approach to live in general!

Hi Kathy–

Thanks for the link; I’ll give it a look.

I will miss all my sad and pouty emotocons if I leave the government site, however. And if I don’t have them, I won’t know that I’m doing right.

“Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a page that would show the correlation between USDA dietary recommendations and U.S. farm output/food categories? ”

I had a similar thought, but the graphic I was imagining was one that correlated Federal diet recommendations with lobbyist spending by the various industries — ie, Archer Daniels Midland & Ore-Ida vs. Florida Citrus Growers Assn. vs. Cattle Assn.

I too have used FitDay and found it to be very useful. The frowny-faces on the USDA and other sites (DietWatch used to be that way too) are amusing at first, and lend to one’s sense of superior knowledge, but get tiresome after a while. –Anne

This is why I quit MyFoodDiary.com and use fitday.com exclusively. MFD had those smilies and frownies too and while I understand that they can be great motivators, they were based on whatever MFD considered healthy, not one’s own custom goals, and therefore ended up infuriating to me when I started transitioning to low-carb, high-fat eating.

And another idea that might be to do a pyramid graph comparing farm lobbying/political donations with the like from the meat biz, and putting it next to the standard USDA pyramid (www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/index.html) to see how they compare.

I had to use the usda’s chart for two weeks last summer as part of a college course and I sure got tired of seeing the unhappy emoticons — my favorite day was when the instructor was taking me to task for not meeting the macronutrient goals and I suggested that we take a look at the micronutrients just for kicks. She was nearly rubbing her palms together in anticipation of once again taking me to task when low and behold the charts revealed that on 12 of the14 days I had managed to meet every single micronutrient goal! I just grinned as she tried to explain how this diet could still not be good for me.

Julie

Good for you. Put another mark in the low-carb column.

A number of papers – including Yudkins – have shown that a low-carb diet provides plenty of micronutrients.

Dr. MRE – Similarly entertaining to go through the “assess your physical activity” part of that site, especially since you were involved with static-contraction-like exercise in “Slow Burn”. Per the USDA site, even 15-minute daily participation in “WEIGHT LIFTING OR BODY BUILDING, VIGOROUS EFFORT” would result in a “Poor” (28%) fitness level. Looks like that web site is batting 1000! -Rick

I posted a nice long comment on the “Many people who think they’re following a low-carb diet really aren’t.” post, in which you posted an article written for a low-carb magazine. I hope you’re able to read it, as the original post is from 2006.

I have been enjoying your blog for the past couple of months, and there’s a wealth of information in it–thank you very much!

I like the fitday program too…you can program in your own goals and ignore the others if you want.

I don’t use it everyday but did a few days ago as I’ve been intermittent fasting. My average calories comes out to about 1100 a day…..I’m losing weight and not hungry at all. I like the fitday also to plug in my recipes and see what the score is on those.

My heart breaks for people like my sister who is over 300 lbs..lives on salads..and gains weight… The people who came up with the food pyramid should be charged with a crime..

Ressy

Hi Ressy–

It is a bad situation for your sister and others like her. I agree about charging the food pyramid people with criminal behavior. Too bad it won’t happen.

I’m going to disagree with you here a bit. Cutting carbs to 120 – 150g a day can indeed be sufficient, depending on LIFESTYLE. I think the larger environment encompassed in ones lifestyle will ultimately determine how successful one is regardless of eating plan. Adopting a low carb eating plan with out a concurrently adopting the LC lifestyle will not yield the same results. Same goes for many other touted diets, ie Mediterranean Diet vs Mediterranean Lifestyle. With out addressing the larger issues of the frenetic pace of modern American life, and the constant pressure to compete and meet deadlines simply picking the bread off your two McD’s quarter pounders while gulping a diet coke, texting on the black berry on the way to a meeting with a client, while yelling at your kid in the back seat on the way to soccer practice really doesn’t address the problem now does it?

Regards,
Kevin

Hi Kevin–

I agree with you. There is no absolute number of carbs required for weight loss. It is a function of lifestyle. But to get the metabolic ‘magic’ of the low carb diet, carbs have to be low enough to stimulate a sort of ongoing gluconeogenesis, which then makes everything else good happen.

I like Fitday for the reasons mentioned above. Many days, after I enter my data and see the calorie count, I often have to ask “Is that ALL??” Sometimes I go back to make sure I’ve entered everything. I often overestimate the fat. For not worrying about calories and feeling satisfied, I’m eating less than I did during my craving-driven, low fat-high carb days.

This is a fun little toy of a website and turned out to be rather eye-opening as well since I’m currently trying to lose fat. I thought I was keeping my carbs under 25 a day but it rather looks like I’m already at 27 – 29 with dinner yet to come. I notice that you ate nearly zero dairy products. Maybe that is my downfall because I tend to rely on them a lot. String cheese (1 carb per oz), LC cheesecake (3.5 carbs), etc…

What is SO difficult about using these calorie/carb/nutrition websites is entering data for things like the stirfry that I made yesterday which has at least 12 ingredients. Or the cheesy cauliflower & broccoli casserole that we like so much. I’d have to calculate the carbs for the entire dish, subtract fiber, then divide by the number of servings. That’s too much math when you’re on the run and who can tell how many servings will come out of a certain dish.

It would be easy if we all just ate plain slabs of meat and sliced veg, but as soon as you get creative in the kitchen the carb count becomes much harder to calculate. I’m going to check out fitday.com. Thanks for another great post.

Hi Laurel–

In our experience the three things that sabotage low-carb diets the most are cheese, nuts and nut butters.

Nobby Hola….Do i/we take it that GT’s new book, Good Cals, Bad Cals is a book you’d consider one of the best books in recent years ..or even the best book on foody and what it does to ones bod and the mismonas that surround foody ?
I ask this as you’ve waxed lyrical about it, read it thrice and Taubes is super bloody smart anyways.

Thanks much.

Hi Simon–

I do think it’s one of the best things to come out in decades. And will get much attention because Taubes is a well-respected journalist and won’t be seen as trying to sell and particular dietary regimen. I encourage you to read the book.

Just a quick follow-up question regarding supplements. Above, you told one woman that a multi-vitamin wasn’t really necessary as long as you were eating a varied (low-carb) diet. Is that true for most (all?) supplements?

I’ve just come back from a physical therapy evaluation for an ankle injury I suffered a year ago and recently re-injured. I’m 52 and in menopause. I had a bone scan in 2003 that came out at 1.3 (which I believe is quite good). I do light or interval treadmill/elliptical/bike/walk at least 2 or 3 times a week, mostly because I like it. I also weight train. Currently I’m trying more of a “Slow Burn” type of weight training. I have worked out with weights for about 8 years now on a semi-regular/semi-IRregular basis.

Anyway, the PT told me I needed to take Vitamin D and at least 1000 mg of calcium a day because of menopause. I don’t use sunblock and am in the sun frequently (but never burn) so I believe I’m getting enough Vitamin D, and I eat cheese on a fairly regular basis so I think I’m getting enough calcium.

*****Do I still need to supplement these nutrients?*****

I go back and forth on supplements, sometimes taking 11 or more pills morning and night, then get tired of taking all those pills and spending all that money, so other times I take nothing more than magnesium and potassium, and sometimes nothing at all.

The PT doesn’t know I eat low carb. I suspect he would vehemently disagree with my way of eating, so I say as little as I can in that regard.

Thank you for your patience in answering all of our questions. You da man!

Hi Kathy–

You’re probably getting plenty of calcium. As to the vitamin D, I don’t know. It depends on where you live, i.e., how far north. When I’m out in the sun for a long period of time – playing golf or hanging out at the beach – I don’t take vitamin D. On the days I don’t go out because I’m in front of the computer answering comments I take 5000 IU of Vitamn D3, the only kind to take.

Ah, I wish I could eat that much fat and feel full. Unfortunetly, I have to take one of those lovely SSRI drugs (anti-depressant). After gained 40 pounds on it and having to count calories in order to lose, I have come to the conclusion that SSRIs actually mess with the hunger center in the brain. It takes an incredible amount of food to make me feel full, and fat doesn’t seem to satiate me any better than protein or whole grain. So a simple low-carb diet, no matter how low I go on the carbs, has never made me feel full.

So I try to keep the fat lower in my diet (to trim calories) and keep the protein high and the carbs somewhat moderate. I do shoot for less than 120 net grams of carbs a day, and most days I am between 80 and 100g. At 1300 calories a day (with exercise) I can pretty well maintain my weight and maybe lose very slowly.

BTW, I’m with Kathy. I use FitDay.com to track my food. It took some time to get used to it, but you can enter custom foods and the free version is accessible online from any computer. You just have to pick a username and password. I also track my weight and my exercise on FitDay and it will do nutritional breakdowns for you, too.

One thing I’ve done with people who have a fairly good sense of geography is to have them visualize what parts of the USA produce what sort of “food groups.” Imagine taking a map of the USA, coloring it and cutting it up, and re-assembling it into a pyramid. You get, indirectly, the sort of lobby power the different foodgroups have. You can also put Hawaiian sugar on the top and Archer Daniels Midland corn-syrup on the bottom, although the USDA says to use both items sparingly.

The food pyramid is a political document, shaped by political forces much the same way as the monumental tombs of Egypt that inspired the shape. Once one realizes that it is politics, not science, that motivates the Food Pyramid, one can much more easily ignore the damnable thing.

I wonder what would happen if all low-carb experts focussed their attention on one city (one of the fattest cities in America, like Detroit or Houson) and then got dramatic results? Maybe main-stream journalists, and politicians across the country might listen if they saw the manifestation of science instead of just hearing it ramble.

Of course, there’d be a problem of getting everyone to agree on the details, but with everyone supporting fewer carbs and more fat, some people are bound to listen. It would have to change the current “wisdom,” if only for that city.

It would be a great idea, but don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen. I suspect people will have to change one individual at a time.

I was proud of every sad emoticon I was issued! Reminds me of the website parody of mypyramid.gov. http://www.mypyramid.org/inside.php Many probably remember it from a couple/few years back. Thanks Dr. Mike for another excellent blogpost.

I appreciated this blog, but not for the reasons you intended, I’m sure.

It was priceless to me just to be able to see how what and much you actually eat during the course of a day. How many calories, how much protein, fat and carbs–in a very specific way! I felt like if I could ever see what *you* actually eat in a day, I could get a better handle on what you’re actually recommending in PP/PPLP.

(I would have been happier to see MD’s food, since she’s a woman, but I’ll take what I can get! 😉 )

What actually surprised me is just how “little” you eat! Was that a typical day?

I eat more than you do!!! I’m a 5 feet 6 inch 42 year old lightly active female! I weigh 137 pounds and have a body fat of about 28%.

I suppose I should be happy that I can eat more protein and a LOT more fat than you do (Several times a week, I eat or drink 1/2 Cup of heavy cream!) and not gain weight, and in fact, lost 41 pounds doing that. I would like to lose more, but I think that I have reached that sort of equilibrium with my calories and my current weight and body fat, and I’m not willing to eat less protein or fat to lose more weight. So there we have it, huh? The proverbial “bottom line!”

But at least now I know what I “could do,” if I get serious about losing some more weight?

Thanks for sharing some of yourself in that way. It really opened my eyes.

Elle

Hi Elle–

FYI MD eats pretty much the same as I do, just less. She has two eggs and two patties of sausage for breakfast and almost never finishes her steak at dinner whereas I eat all of mine and gnaw the bone. The one thing she consumes that I don’t is cream. She drinks half and half in her coffee; I drink mine black.

Here is a post from a month or so ago showing photos of actual meals that MD made for the two of us. My plate is the one shown

Dr. Eades, I was a little surprised by your calorie intake! I’m a 5’8″, 28 year old woman — currently 150 pounds — and on any given day, I range between 1700 – 2000 calories. I’ve been losing pretty well at this level (28 pounds since April), so I’m amazed that you’re maintaining your weight on less than I usually eat! Any ideas about what could account for this? I always thought guys needed so many more calories than gals did!

Hi Aeryn–

It’s just the beauty of the low-carb diet. If you haven’t seen this post take a look. It shows what the same amount of calories can do depending upon the composition of those calories.

I’m a 6’2″, 190 lb male who is older than 28, but I do fine on the circa 2000 kcal diet. That’s what I eat most of the time, with occasional overindulgences. My carb intake typically stays between 50-100 gms per day, and I let the rest of the calories fall where they may.

I know that I am computer illeterate but what I had a difficult time with, on the site was being able to post accurate amounts of the food I ate. Such as the amount of steak that I ate. I wanted to include the coconut oil that I used in one meal and it didn’t have coconut oil as a selection. It had other coconut products but no oil. I did enjoy the site and I want to spend more time on it. I am happy to see that you and Mary eat very similarly to me and my family. If I see that you are going to be speaking in Anaheim, I will invite you to dinner.;-)

Just to add to Aeryn’s comment, I eat more than my husband. This is why I find it necessary to do intermittent fasting instead of eating 3-6 meals a day.

Interesting post. I was wondering if you are familiar with metabolic adaptations? I’m trying to get my body fat % down to 5% and all of the textbook calculations of how many calories I need to consume to reach my goals don’t really apply, and I’ve read in Dr. Ellis’s Ultimate Diet Secrets about these metabolic adaptations and was wondering if you’d heard of them too. Thanks.

Hi Muata–

I’m not really familiar with Dr. Ellis’s work so I’m not really sure what it is he means by metabolic adaptations.

Hi, I loaded my food intake for the day and was informed that my calorie intake is half of what it should be. However, for the most part, my nutrient consumption was right on the money.Oh another thing, my carb intake was 30 grams. This is pretty cool since I have not counted my carb intake once I learned how to eat the right foods.